1990 Directed by Tobe Hooper
An ancient Aztec cloth with a curse accidentally finds its way into the possession of a young woman. She decides to make a dress from the cloth. Whoever wears this cloth/dress comes under its spell; all inhibitions and moral responsibilities are lost.
Mädchen Amick Corey Parker Daisy Hall R. Lee Ermey Natalie Schafer Jason Brooks William Berger Mary Frann Dee Wallace Anthony Perkins Lew Horn Stuart Fratkin Dan Leegant Jack McGee Ed Trotta David Carlile Felicia Lansbury Henry C. brown Ellen Gerstein Ivan Gueron Juan García Frank DiElsi Richard Penn Xavier Barquet Matthew Walker Robert Harvey Bill Madden
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Tobe Hooper Time! After all, it's Hooptober9
This little made-for-cable item that Hooper knocked off for the USA Network....is not The Master's best work. Still, it is watchable and some gold can be mined here and there. IDT fits into that very specific subgenre of Cursed Garments. A shining example of this category would be Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018). A slightly lesser case would be Slaxx (2020).
Honestly, it was hard to see the fingerprints of the director who gave us Texas Chainsaw Massacre in this film. Can't even imagine that this is the guy who did Eaten Alive (1976). Still, Hooper was working under network constraints. He also did that (and excelled) with 1979's miniseries Salem's Lot,…
If nothing else this movie taught me what cottage fries are.. I had never heard of them before?? I love learning about potatoes!!
Scholarly commentary by Hooper fan and genre filmmaker Michael Varrati did have some enjoyable tidbits. This flick was based on a novella by Cornell Woolrich and was also adapted into a short for that late nineties erotic series The Hunger, which I'd almost forgotten about. I'll make time for any commentary about a Hooper film and I'm blown away that we got two tracks for this and The Mangler recently. 6.7/10
Tobe Hooper directs this wack Fear Street knockoff where Shelly from Twin Peaks finds a haunted mummy dress that makes her. . . dangerous. After slipping on the evil gown, she becomes a wild delinquent who ditches her bedridden grandma to dance seductively at a college formal. Lots of amazing early '90s baggy fall fashions and a supporting turn from Anthony Perkins as a cursed object occult expert push the movie over the top. The plot gets kinda muddled halfway through, the pacing feels slack, and Hooper doesn't go ape enough with the premise. But if you can find the tape, I'm Dangerous Tonight is a fun enough way to kill 90 minutes and fill in more esoteric patches of the Texan horror maestro's filmography.
How come nobody told me that Tobe Hooper churned out one of the low-key gayest horror movies of the 90s? I know this is based on a Cornell Woolrich novella, but it plays out more like a perverted take on Teen Witch or any number of other Disney Channel teen girl empowerment movies. only with Mädchen Amick fighting with Dee Wallace over control of a deadly dress made from an Aztec mummy's burial shroud. Between giving Anthony Perkins and Natalie Schafer roles and at times exposing and lingering on more male flesh than female (including a shower murder), I can only really wonder just how much of the camp value is intentional.
Imagining Madchen Amick's wickedly seductive dance sequence with Stevie Wonder's "The Woman in Red" on the soundtrack instead of that more generic music. I smell a fan edit coming. Wouldn't be surprised if that's already on YouTube, but I honestly haven't checked.
Well, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre finally gets his Cinderella story. Certainly among Hooper's loopier and more forgotten assignments. All the colors of giallo are here looking splendid in this eye popping restoration from Kino Lorber. It's a lightweight nineties cable flick so horror fans should temper expectations. Perkins really isn't in this much either, but still manages to make the innocuous dialogue sound perversely inappropriate. 6.2/10
Hooptober VIII, Ch. 1
As my inaugural "Hooptober" Halloween-season horror movie viewing for 2021, I'm right where I want to be: on a college campus in the early '90s, witchcraft and ancient curses and a mystery whodunnit and a beautiful ingenue fighting evil and an iconic genre star furrowing his brow to fulfill red herring status. It's of a kind with the later '90s slasher "Urban Legend" though not as stylish or boisterously loaded with teen idols and character actors, so I'd have to give "Legend" the (l)edge(nd). That one has more fun. This Tobe Hooper effort suffers from TV-movie dehydration (and a repellently lame Lifetime Original title that belies its airing on the much more fiendishly seedy USA Network…
Wholly watchable and unremarkable tv thriller. Peaks when Madchen Amick does a sexy dance to midi conga music that's str8 outta Wave Race 64.
I love that this can cut from the shot of Amick caressing her boyfriend while he struggles with his dalliance of evil to the absurd goofy image of R. Lee Ermey arriving late while smoking a cigarette. That cut includes a lot of what is good about it. There's a certain TV movie quality to it, I'm Dangerous Tonight could use be a little more violent, and pace can come and goes according to its needs to obscure narrative. Hooper does direct it with a very good eye, lots of striking images throughout and the main trust between sexuality, usually female, and repression, based mostly in religious fundamentalism, is observed with more care than usual. One of the better uses of late Anthony Perkins. It is based on a Cornel Woorlich story, and it is among the ones that capture his perspective the better.
Hooper's proto-Goosebumps for grownups. Not gonna lie... I'm kind of into that.
Hooptober Film #6
Tobe Hooper Films 1/2
Its a very Cinderella style story. The beautiful nice girl stays with her Aunt & cousin, where she has to do everything they want, and care for her granny.
Amy is such a wet nice girl. She gets used for everyone's errands, doing peoples coursework, dressmaking for her aunt, grannysitting. Eurgh cmon girl
Praise be that a cursed cape exists, and brings some excitement into Amy's life. When the material comes into contact with someone it brings out their inner demon. Guess what, she makes it into a dress - and it looks good!
Its a TV Movie, there are deaths, but of course there is no gore. Amy does a very cringy sexy…
One of the things I love about Tobe Hooper is that he went from making one of the most unrelentingly brutal horror films ever ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") to just fucking around and having fun by the mid-80s (when he essentially parodied his own creation and, most particularly, the slasher boom that it had helped create with the kamikaze "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2").
"I'm Dangerous Tonight" shows Hooper having fun and not taking the whole filmmaking business too seriously. It starts with a professor receiving an Aztec sacrificial altar that contains a cursed Aztec priest robe. The professor tries it on and immediately goes berserk, killing a nearby security guard and then his wife and himself. A meek, subservient college…
